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A PROGRAMME OF STORE BASED RESEARCH BASED ON THE CARDIFF CONSUMER PANEL. NEIL WRIGLEY Wrigley, Neil 1985: A Programme of Store Based Research Based on the Cardiff Consumer Panel. Cambria, 12(2) pp. 207 to pp. 223. Part II of Davies, W.K.D. (ed) Human Geography from Wales: Proceedings of the E.G.. Bowen Memorial Conference. ISSN 0306-9796. A research programme concerned with developing and testing a new generation of methods for retail analysis and forecasting is discussed. This was based on the Cardiff Consumer Panel Survey: the most comprehensive panel survey of shopping behaviour ever carried out in the U.K., and a major resource for geographical research. Neil Wrigley, Dept. of Geography, University of Bristol, Bristol, England. BS8 1 SS. Over the past twenty years there have been profound changes in the British grocery retailing industry. Large, aggressive and highly profitable retail corporations have emerged, and have progressively increased their grip on the market (e.g., three corporations, Sainsburys, Tesco and Asda had built up a combined market share of 32% of U.K. grocery sales by 1984). The large profits, (e.g. £ 156 million in 1984-85 by Sainsburys), and huge positive net cash flows generated by these corporations, even in periods of economic recession, have financed major expansion programmes, and there is scarcely a city or major town in Britain whose retail structure has not been transformed by the building of new superstores. This, in turn, has had significant consequences for a number of traditional elements within the retail structure (independent grocers, co-operative stores, city centre retailing areas, etc.) and for typical patterns of shopping behaviour for a large proportion of the population of Britain. The expansion programmes of the major corporations have, in their turn, generated new demands on the academic research community. First, to supply skilled manpower to staff the fast-expanding in-house 'Store Location and Research Units' which many of the larger corporations have now set up. Second, to supply new techniques which can be used by these in-house units to assess the potential of store locations and to forecast the market performance of individual retail outlets. In this paper, an ESRC-funded research programme concerned with providing such methods for retail analysis and forecasting purposes will be described. The programme has particular relevance to geographical research in Wales, as development and testing of the